In another wonderful turn of events, it appears that Apple wanted to charge companies who want to use the Made for iPod seal on their products 10% of the retail price on each item sold. After someone realized that this idea probably wouldn’t fly, Apple changed its stance - now they only want 10% of the wholesale price. This is all probably because the iPod has been such a failure, and Apple has made barely anything on the rogue device. Charging a whopping 10% of the wholesale price just might help move the iPod into the mainstream market, while helping to get its name out there. Right.

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Giant Robot is basically a Japanese pop culture review. One of the major parts of this is the Giant Robot toys that are made. I think that pursuing these creations is almost like a visit to a museum. Each item just has a unique look and feel to them. Take the Eishi Takaoka Head for example. It is just an interesting piece of work. It stands at about 6 inches, half of which is the hand carved head. This one goes for $200 due to its uniqueness and delicacy, but you can find plenty of things that are far less expensive. Take a look, and let us know if something catches your eye.

You’ve seen blood and violence in games. You’ve seen prostitution and theft. Now, you can experience the drug effects of marijuana and crack, in Midway’s latest remake for the PS2 and Xbox: Narc. A digital puff of marijuana will slow the action of the game, while taking Ecstasy gets the screen all glowy and trippy, as seen here. Finally, using crack will give the player better accuracy while aiming. Here’s the catch though. If you use the drugs, you run the risk of getting addicted to them in the game. The producers also say that you can finish the game without them as well, so player’s aren’t forced to try it out. Just like real life, I suppose.

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According to eWeek sources, Apple will soon let the big cat out of its cage. Mac OS X 10.4 (better known as Tiger) seems to be on target for an April 15 launch. Steve Jobs claims that Apple’s next generation operating system is “years ahead of [Microsoft’s] Longhorn”, as Tiger will feature many improvements over Apple’s existing OS such as a new desktop search engine, better versions of its core applications such as Mail, a new utility named Dashboard, and other development and design tools. The new system will also expand Apple’s support for the 64-bit G5 processor and will improve math calculation speed throughout the system. Until we can get our hands on Apple’s next OS check out the Mac OS X Tiger Tour to see what is soon to come.

Okay, now it’s pretty obvious that Google enjoys OS X as much as the rest of us. According to Google’s Blog, the project started as a late-night project in order to learn Javascript & DHTML. The result is a Mac OS X inspired version of Google - Google X. At this time the link to the Google Labs version is not working, however, we were able to find a mirror thanks to Tech info Blog. Check it out here.

At the Strategic Account Summit, Microsoft’s answer to Google AdWords was introduced – MSN adCenter. This prototype is designed to help advertisers generate more revenue with the ability to connect to the desired audience throughout the MSN network. The new technology will provide advertisers in depth audience details such as geographic location, gender, age group, lifestyle segment and time of day – thus being able to generate more clicks. Microsoft did not provide many details on how the technology is able to obtain such statistics. Seems that as advertising technology is improved, our privacy seems to diminish as well.

Google goes Open Source with its latest offering – Google Code. The new page offers developer tools and projects which can be used to develop applications for use in conjunction with many of Google’s services. Google will feature a project every week on its Google Code page. Of course, you may submit your projects to Google via email and see if they feature it.

In the latest issue of NOM Magazine, Yuji Naka, head of Sega developers - Sonic Team, sat down for an interview to deal out some goods about the next few games in development for Gamecube and DS. Also, the article hints about a future Mario and Sonic game in the works:

Sonic Team head, Yuji Naka, revealed two new Sonic the Hedgehog games for Nintendo in an exclusive interview with NOM in London at the end of last year.

“We are in development with a new GameCube Sonic game, which we hope to release before the end of 2005,” Naka exclusively revealed to us. “Sonic Team is also currently making a Sonic game for the DS. We are taking our time to make sure the game makes good use of the DS’s many new features.” Double whammy!

We pressed for details and Naka revealed that the DS game will incorporate parts of the screen-rubbing Sonic tech-demo shown at E3 last year. Naka expects both titles to be playable at this year’s E3 and, as always, we’ll be there to see it all.

Pick up NOM UK next month for the full interview, where Yuji Naka reveals his secret conversations with Shigeru Miyamoto about getting Sonic and Mario to appear in a game together.

Another contest has come to a close, this one sees three people walk away with one year of free online storage courtesy of Box.net. The three winners are benplaut, bayyar, and TheMetsAreBad. You will now have 1 GB of online storage for a year. All the rest of us can get it on it for $2.99 per month.

You just can’t seem to please everyone. Make bikes too loud, and pedestrians complain about the noise. Make them fuel-cell powered and super-quiet and people say they’re an accident hazard. The new prototype bike, developed by British manufacturers Intelligent Energy, are said to make about as much noise as a PC. In an even greater act of blasphemy, they are going to add a switch on the bike to allow artificially generated noise so that people will know when it’s approaching. No, it’s not April first yet.